Building Social Authority in Article Marketing

Link Wheels are a Kick Start to Building Social Authority with Article Marketing

It’s been a few weeks since we touched on our core topics of social media and search engine optimization but we are back today with discussion of how to use link wheel theory to build social authority in your article marketing campaigns.

What exactly is a Link Wheel?

A Link wheel is a group of articles or article snippets joined in a circle by one link to 1 of the spokes and one link to your featured article at the center hub of the wheel. Each Article or Article preview postwill have social media links inbound to it and be shared socially to amplify and broadcast the message. At the core of it though is a set of articles that have been shared socially and are cited as reference all siting your website or blog as a source for their information.

Link Wheel Spokes

Link Wheel Spokes are often posted on community blog platforms like WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Blogger, or social media site blogs and article repositories. They can also be articles distributed on Article Directories such as E-zine Articles. Choosing prime real estate is like choosing a home except that instead of being close to schools and hospitals you want direct connections to social media outlets like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and Stumble Upon. Another favorite of mine that can add extra income is to create a hub on Squidoo that sort of gathers the best of each of the referring sites plus related videos and products etc.. but that’s another post altogether.

When you plan a major article on a niche topic you wish to rank highly in search engines for you need to have a plan or content map.

Plan your main topic, and plan at least 4-6 related subjects to act as your spoke post. A prime example would be a post on your site titled, “Brain Surgery” and spoke post on Brain Injury, Concussions, Brain Cancer, and Aneurysms that will all link to content in the main post on brain surgery. Then link one post to another to form a circle around your main post so each outlying post links to the Brain Surgery post and 1 other blog post. From there start at the outlying post and begin social sharing and social bookmarking to start your traffic funnel.

In the end you will have a network of quality content that will drive traffic towards your site by referrals while picking up the authority of being referenced often.

To amplify the effects of the link wheel you can seek to create partnerships with other blogs and businesses who are in your same niche market and exchange regular guest post. The reason this is a great deal stronger is these are self hosted domain names that are dedicated to similar topics, are building their own authority, and don’t have any of the bad links, poor traffic quality, and spam that community blogs are often held back by. In addition the readers from these pages are already researching the topic you are promoting so they tend to engage with your content longer, read multiple pages, and click share if your content is of use.